APGAR scores, imbalanced sacrums, and a penchant for the history and philosophy of chiropractic are just the beginning of things we talk about with Dr Patrick Montgomery. He has taught at multiple chiropractic schools in his career while working in clinical practice & research. He is also Dr Bagley’s favorite professor from her time at Logan University. Tune in as she shares the importance of preserving chiropractic history and research, explores stories from his private practices, and how chiropractic assists women in their pregnancy and delivery. This is a must-listen episode!
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Dr Patrick Montgomery
8 To 80, Blind, Cripple & Crazy, We Help Them All
We have Dr. Patrick Montgomery from Logan University.
He was my favorite professor. Whenever I think about Logan, I always think about you, Dr. Montgomery, and how much of an impact you had on me, especially now knowing that even after retirement from private practice, you’re still continuing to teach and give your wonderful knowledge to all these students. Thank you for being with us.
Thank you, Dr. Bagley and Dr. Schurger. I’m pleased to be here.
We’re glad to have you.
I could read everything about you. You graduated in ‘76 from Logan. You are teaching there, but you’ve done private practice for many years. You retired a couple of years ago from private practice. How long ago was that?
Last November 2023 will be a year from then.
Chiropractic Work
We’re going to have to talk to you about that. You’ve had countless publications. You have done a lot with the Logan Basic, which is a technique that will come up and we’ll talk about. Some of the cool things that you’ve been doing is you have an LCP, Legion of Chiropractic Philosopher Certificate. You are heavily involved with the Association of History of Chiropractic. What is your involvement with them?
When I first was teaching at Palmer West, I was one of the first professors. I was one of four full-time teachers. We started in a closed-down elementary school. It was started by Northern California students who wanted to have a chiropractic college there. They went out and hired their teachers and a president. They stumbled along for a few years under the name of a Northern California Chiropractic College. A friend comes to join me every now and then.
What’s your kitty’s name?
This is Tiger. He is a little kid, and he behaves like one. He’ll be in and out of the picture. We started a chiropractic college out there. They were looking for accreditation, and they didn’t know how to go about it. They went to Palmer and asked Palmer if they would take it over. The board of trustees at Palmer agreed to that. They changed the name from Northern California College to Palmer Chiropractic West. Half the students decided to go there. The other half of the students got a sponsorship from Dr. Sid Williams at Life Life College. That’s where Life College West began.
After the students went up the Bay to Hayward, half the students stayed down in San Jose. I started teaching there. While I was starting to teach there, we had a visitor from a doctor who, even some people that Logan knew a lot about the guy. The doctor’s name was Dr. Fred Barge. Dr. Barge was promoting some of the new texts that he wrote. One of them was a text on scoliosis. He had volume one with his Tortipelvis. Volume two was Torticollis, and volume three was Scoliosis.
The President of Palmer West asked all the teachers to get together, and they wanted Dr. Barge to address this. Now, unbeknownst to most of the people there besides me is that years ago, when colleges were not as big as they are now, some of the schools were only 2, 3, and 4 years. When a doctor would graduate from one, he knew all he could about one college. They move on to another college, attend classes there, and graduate from that college. Sometimes, they get 2 or 3 chiropractic college degrees.
How? I had no idea that people used to do that.
That’s what Dr. Barge did. He graduated from Palmer. His dad was a Palmer graduate, but he wanted to know more about biomechanics. He came down to Logan. When Vinton Logan, the second president, was alive and was the president of the college, he studied under them and became fascinated with X-ray measurements. That’s one big thing in Logan Basic.
When he wrote his book on scoliosis, he had done some original research, which is still used now. He came with a question. He would see someone’s full spine X-ray and notice a curvature in the lumbar spine that didn’t make any sense from the view that was taken. When you take a view of the AP, the pelvis is seen as level. It didn’t see distortion within the pelvis, but the lumbar spine would go way off to one side. It doesn’t make any sense.
What he did is he went back into his own practice. He randomly selected about 130 X-rays, studied them, and decided to do one more X-ray. The X-ray was because you could not see the sacral base, a normal AP film. What he did was, to get a good AP film of the sacral base, he had to measure the sacral base angle. You take a lateral X-ray, either full spine or lateral lumbar, measure that, and set up his X-ray tube to the right amount angle. When you take the shot, you have a perfect view of the sacral base and L5.
I’m going to break one second because Dr. Frederick and I are both thinking in our heads how similar this is to what Dr. Blaire did with his Protracto views of the atlas. My brain is going, “They were on the same page, but they were looking at two different areas. They are looking at the joint itself rather than the overall looking but at that joint.”
That brings up a good point. In this world, many chiropractors are being taught that you shouldn’t take X-rays because it doesn’t give anything.
In this world, many chiropractors are being taught that you shouldn't take X-rays because it does not give anything. Share on X
That’s wrong.
That is the core of what we do. It is the blueprint of which we’re working with. He took these X-rays. They found some fascinating things. They found out that the sacral base itself was malformed. Sometimes, all five, but most of the time, the sacral base. He found that most of the female X-rays showed that they had a pedestal or a plateau at the top of their sacral base. He took all these X-rays, measured how big they were, measured the dimensions, and studied the statistics that came from that. He found that only 8% of male pelvises had a plateau. Most of them were flat. Another 40% had a small plateau. Idiom had a large plateau. Most of them were completely flat, which is what you would expect. Look at a plastic skeleton.
However, for the females, only 7% had a flat sacrum, 40% had a low pestle, and a whopping 45% had a high pedestal. I have repeated his research. I found some of these pedestals are 25 millimeters high. In other words, it’s a full inch. What was even more fascinating is he found that 67% of the people with plateaus were asymmetrical. That was the unleveling that was causing the driving curvature even though the rest of the pelvis was level. It was something that you could not adjust the way. It was structural, built into the beginning of the base.
No matter how many times you want to adjust L5 and take it uphill, it’s not going to stay there. As soon as the person stands up, weight-bearing, it’s going to roll back. Unless you take that last film, many times you don’t know the full care plan of the patient to help them with their scoliosis. We all know that the scoliosis itself does not necessarily cause pain. It allows for things that do cause pain to happen much more often. We call those comorbidities, but most of those comorbidities are what we call subluxations. How are we going to adjust them and “get it to hold?” You cannot exercise that. You have to lift it with mechanical lift, usually starting in the heel or what you set on.
Scoliosis itself does not necessarily cause pain. It allows for things that do cause pain to happen much more often. Share on X
Preserving History And Research
Getting back to why that was important. At about that time, many of the early chiropractors who did all this original research were dying. Many of their memories, achievements, and research were being lost. When Palmer West first started, there was a brand new PhD, who was also a psychologist who graduated from the University of Pacific. He was hired by Palmer West to teach research methodology. At Palmer West, I was an outsider. I was a token Logan guy.
John Miller, the President of Palmer West, wanted that one person from this school and one person from that school. He tried to get a more rounded approach. He hired this brand new, duly minted PhD to start teaching research methodology. He and I were both outsiders. We started talking. We had our offices right next to each other. He was moving his big boxes around and hurt himself.
He came looping in the next day. He comes knocking on my door and says, “I know that we’ve just met, but I have a problem.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “I’ve hurt my back. I’ve never been to a chiropractor before. I come from a medical background. The people I’m working with on the other side of the school were saying nothing to me. Could I ask you to take a look at me?” I said, “I’d be happy to.”
I examined him and found out what was going on. As a Basic practitioner, I said, “I need to use what’s called Logan Basic.” He said, “What’s that?” I explained to him what Basic was all about. He goes, “You have to be kidding me.” I said, “No, this works. You’d be surprised.” I adjusted him. After one adjustment, the vast majority of his pain was gone. I adjusted him the next time. He was straight and feeling great. We became better friends.
About that time, I did the first conference on literature. I was talking to him. I said, “We need to start collecting this information to talk to the doctors before they die about their studies.” He took that by heart. He always had a chip on his shoulder. He said that some of the stuff that we were talking about was made-up stuff. As his dose dot, you had to understand this more.
He wrote seven books. He published 500 papers. Sometimes, people liked the papers. Sometimes, they hated him. You probably know him, Dr. Schurger. He was Joe Keating. I knew Joe. I knew what his approach was. He went to check and challenge it. You say that and show me. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe you. He says, “You have to show me. I’m not going to take your word for it.” For half a profession, he bits them off. He worked at five different colleges. He ended up passing away when he and I worked on another project together.
The association was formed in 1980 to start to collect the credible history of our great profession. Since that time, for the past many years, we have put out two peer-reviewed journals a year. Most of them have been 8 to 15 well-documented papers. Some of the stuff that comes up is I’ve never heard of it. I thought that was wonderful. Where the association comes in is for the people who want to see our past remembered, published, and worked with. We come up with our next big research projects. If everybody is reading this, please join us.
Do we go on to the website? How do we find you guys?
All you do is go on the website. It’s called www.HistoryOfChiropractic.org.
I’ll be doing that.
I started Palmer the weekend I moved into my apartment before starting Palmer. The following week was the weekend that Fred Barge passed away. I missed hearing him. I’ve heard many of his tapes and recordings over the years since because he is that mind where he would look at things from an analytical viewpoint. The story that I understood goes BJ sent him down to Logan to say, “You’re an expert at upper cervical, but they’re doing something down there with the pelvis that is working clearly.” They work together.
Dr. Bagley and I both use technique aspects from the Basic work when there’s something that’s not quite there from what we do with the upper neck. It’s interesting to see how these things go back, preserving history and remembering where we came from. I was listening to something else. This holds true beyond families. They were talking about family wealth. A grandfather will create a business and the son will take it over. By the time it gets to the third generation, people start forgetting it. That holds true in institutions like chiropractic. If we don’t get into it and preserve it properly, it will die. We’ve got so much amazing stuff and an amazing, rich history. We need to show the receipts of how we get people better.
I had a patient with trigeminal neuralgia. She was referred in by another colleague. I adjusted her. Her pain went from 9 to 6 within a minute or two of the adjustment. By the time she finished her 30-minute rest, she was down to three. She hasn’t been this low in years. Her husband, who has some problems, is going to come in and start next week. The wife already said, “Can I pay for his now?” I’m like, “Yeah.” There are the receipts for her, but we have to show that to the rest of the profession and help the medical profession along with understanding that stuff. Preserving the history is a step in the right direction. What was the website one more time? We’ll put it in the show notes.
It’s www.HistoryOfChiropractic.org.
Do you guys still have the Facebook page?
We have 5,000 people on our Facebook page.
I love it when you put stuff out there. I’m always commenting on that.
There’s another gentleman out of Michigan who used to dress up like BJ. Is he still involved with the program?
No. The person in that area now is John Wolf. He is the son of the Founder of Northwestern. He’s been our journal editor for the past several years. He’s done a great job.
When you were at Logan, was Barge still around, or had he already gone back to Wisconsin?
He had already gone back. He left Logan between ‘61 and ‘64. I started at Logan in ‘73.
It’s a good year. It’s funny because I had another doc who was a Grostic doc whose uncles were part of the founding of NUCCA back in the day. He finished Palmer in ‘73.
I remember when NUCCS first came out. It was the name of their association. One of my classmates went somewhere in town to study one of the first seminars. When he came back, he was all jazzed. I had been suffering from a right-sided deep headache for years that I couldn’t get adjusted and kept staying. When he came back, he was saying, “It’s going great. I learned how to do this and that.” He was able to see it. I put my hand up and said, “Me.” I laid down there and he did his analysis to me. I’ve never had a right-sided headache again. I do know that stuff works.
The bigger picture is how we can find what works best for people as fast as possible. That way, they can get back to stuff. Don’t ask how many surgeries this young lady had for her trigeminal neuralgia. As my joke continues to go, it’s like, “Doc, I spent this many thousands of dollars. I need to raise my rates.”
Teaching Career
At Logan, you’re teaching a couple of different classes. Philosophy is one of the classes you teach.
I teach the history of chiropractic. Back in the year 2,600 BCE all the way through chiropractic, all the different org associations started. What’s their purpose? Why were they started? Do you know that BJ started both of our national associations? ICA used to be the Chiropractic Health Bureau. ACA, going back several formations, started out as the UCA, which started in 1906. It’s cool when people say, “First-rate, we’re not.”
You’re all from BJ.
It all goes back to BJ and DD.
Are you still teaching Logan Basic at Logan?
I teach Logan Basic, the third in the series. We try to pull everything back together again. The first Logan Basic course is all about the review of the anatomy, how the facets work, and all biomechanics. The second Basic has to do with you having the ideal person. They walked out of Frank Netter’s drawings, and they have a subluxation of the stake. What happens? The same way. Everything else is perfect. That’s when we introduced the X-ray analysis. It’s intense. It’s a month’s worth of lectures, labs, and practice. They take a test.
The third basic has to do with refinements of the technique and talking about the person who’s going to walk in your door with all kinds of oddities. They are talking about the benefits of looking Basic with pregnancy. They do the pregnancy protocol. I would like to remind my good friends at the ICPA that Dr. Larry Webster was a Logan graduate. A lot of the concepts behind the Webster technique all come out of Basic. There are great people with it.
You are going to be teaching outside of Logan at Life University seminar series. What is that all about?
Dr. Claudia Anrig has several irons in the fire. She not only runs a full-time practice. She’s a stead practitioner. She has a full-time practice, but she also has an organization to help new graduates get into taking care of pregnant women and infants with ease and confidence. It’s called the First Adjustment. With Greg Plaugher, she has decided to put together a large textbook called Pediatric Chiropractic. It’s into his third edition. He came to me after the first edition, but she wanted to expand the techniques that are offered in the book. She now has cervical, but she also has SOT, cranial sacral, and Logan Basic. She asked me to write a chapter on that.
There are some fun things about that chapter. I had already finished a long research project. You might have been there at school at the time. From 2006 to 2009, we did a large study on 47 pregnant women. We started there for twenty weeks. We analyzed and adjusted them with Logan Basic and all the aspects of Logan Basic. We followed them all the way through their delivery and two weeks after. They would come in once a week. I had a student assistant write down all the paperwork for me.
At the end of that several-year period, we published a fantastic paper on the ease of labor and delivery with the Logan Basin technique. Forty-seven women went through it. We had two cohorts. One cohort wanted to have an epidural. The other cohort did not. They’re almost evenly spaced. I didn’t try to influence. I told the pros and cons of two different things. The women who had the epidural added twelve hours of labor time because they had the same outcome.
Looking at the other side, the part that didn’t use the epidural, the average first-time labor is between 9 to 19 hours, according to the literature. Our average was 5.1 hours. We had one early delivery. I emphasized that all met pregnant women that full term is not 40 weeks. It’s 42 weeks. If you go beyond 40 weeks, there are other providers who say, “You need to be induced.” Hold off until at least the end of 42 weeks.
There’s another part of Logan Basic that was designed by my father in the ‘60s to help the lease labor and delivery. It’s called the peroneal contact. We used that on all these women. Our fastest delivery was fifteen minutes from start to finish. Our largest baby was delivered vaginally. No tearing, no stitches, no episiotomy, eleven pounds ten. He keeps that baby in an hour and a half.
Was that a first-time mother?
That was a second-time mother. Our first-time mother delivered in more than an hour. Her baby was 11 pounds, 4 ounces, carrying no episiotomy. Out of that, we put our statistics together and found out that the average episiotomy rate has gone down nationally to 37%. The cesarean rate nationally has gone beyond 50% of all deliveries or C-sections.
It’s beyond 50% now.
Yes. In some places like Washington State, it’s 75%. We had a 5% C-section rate.
Do you think that’s more relative to the 40-week versus 42-week terms? That’s increased because they’re pushing the 40-week term.
They’re pushing the 40-week term. If they don’t have that baby by 40 weeks, we’re going to schedule for your c-section. It’s all about the convenience of the doctor and not the convenience of the patient. It is not patient-centered. It’s physician-centered. If you look at the publications by the American Academy of Pediatrics, they say, “There are times that C-sections are necessary. C-section should hang between 15% to 18%.”
That’s even high.
Now, it’s over 50%. We have our work on upwards.
APGAR Scores
I was sad that I hadn’t heard about this study. This is great stuff. I’m going to have to go look that up. One of the questions that has popped into my head related to that study is, did you guys look at the Apgar scores for the child? Where were those compared to the national averages?
We didn’t have one Apgar score under eight. We also had a survey done by the mom. A higher Apgar score is what you want. You want a ten.
It means the baby’s breathing, the color of the baby is good, and the baby looks great. That’s a healthy baby.
Each one of those letters gives you two points. None of ours had a bad Apgar score. The lowest was eight. We did have one baby that was breech. She was our smallest baby. She was six pounds, eight. The average baby was overnight pounds. There were some problems with our mother who had this baby. One of the pieces of advice I tell my pregnant women is to watch their salt intake. You have to watch how much they salt. In some ways, to a woman’s body, if you ask most women who are on their period, how much weight do you gain? Two pounds. There’s more water weight.
Pregnancy is a nine-month-long period. Getting rid of the salt, they start gaining weight over a period of time. The amount of weight per month on the average that you gain is 2 to 3 pounds. When you start hearing they gain 60 or 70 pounds, that’s not fat. That’s water. Water gets in the way. She had gained quite a bit of water weight.
I didn’t see her for about three weeks. She came back, and she looked like she had blown up. I asked what happened. She said, “My husband likes Mexican.” I said, “How many times a week did you eat Mexican?”She said, “Three times a week in the last three weeks.” Her feet were twice as thick as they were before. She had to take her rings off early in her pregnancy, which is one of the key things. You want that ring to be able to be taken off at any time. That means the water retention is okay. All that is going to be coming up in the presentation I’m making with Dr. Claudia and Life. It is in November 2024, but I don’t know. I’ll have to check.
That’s an in-person one.
That’s an in person. I demonstrate and learn techniques over the internet.
Teaching During COVID
How did you handle all that COVID stuff that was happening a couple of years ago when students weren’t allowed to touch each other?
In some ways, it was a perfect storm. When all this started, it happened. The announcement came through when we were on spring break. They decided to extend spring break another week. We have teachers learning how to make their presentations online and the students could stay at home. We came up with how you can teach technique via Zoom? At first, the uppers and the Logan will say, “Yeah, you can do it. Let’s use that. Use that teddy bear. Use this and use that.”
During that presentation, I raised my hand. I said, “I want to let you know something. A few years ago, before you guys came here, we had a pushdown Jefferson City, which is the state capital, for a group that wanted to license a law pass for nature paths.” It was not allowed here in Missouri at the time. The person who presented it, I thought, was in a power-poor job.
Two of our representatives from Logan went to testify. One was Dr. Norman Ketner. They said, “You cannot teach adjusting online.” One of the things in the proposed naturopathic law was that they would teach adjusting what they call manipulation online. That would make them proficient to do it. We testify to get that, saying, “How many hours did it take for a chiropractor to learn how to do this?”
There are over 200 hours. They’re going to do this in full. We said. “How safe it is.” You had to learn how to make sure you were doing it right. It’s how to supervise licensed doctors with their hands. We got defeated. I looked at these three administrators and said, “Do you now want to go back down to Jefferson City?” They say, “Never mind. It’s okay to do this.”
That’s such a good point because that’s the hypocrisy of it. There was so much hypocrisy with chiropractors during COVID. Don’t be afraid of your sick patients. Tell your sick patients to come in. That’s who you need to see as your sick patients. It was like, “Wear the masks. Spray all the Lysol all over you.” That’s the opposite of what most chiropractors with some philosophical base are. It was a struggle. I had some students come through during all of that into my office and how much they weren’t learning and sitting in front of screens. I’m glad that’s over.
We started with a thing called Canva. We did all these recordings. The students had to sit and watch them. Little did they and most of the teachers know that in Canvas, there is a special little button that you can push where you get a list of all the students and you get to see how much did they listen to each lecture. Not much, but when. In the first five minutes, they skip another twenty minutes. See the next five minutes.
I brought this to the dean at the midterm. I said, “I have these students 90 students in my class. I went through and added everything out. Over half of them didn’t watch anything. Only 10% watched the entire thing. Therefore, only 10% of 50% got to see the entire thing.” He said, “It’ll all come out in the assessments. We’ll watch the assessments.” They came to the assessments, and they’re all over the place. I didn’t say it to the students. I kept it to myself. I said, “If you ever became a chiropractor, I’ll never allow you to touch my back because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
It’s interesting for a profession that is hands-on. For many people who are drawn to this profession, they’re not academics. They’ll be A, B, and C students all the way through for the more academic science-based classes. For the hands-on stuff, they are A’s and four-point all the way through. It’s a shame that the institutions said you don’t have to do hands-on for what is a hands-on profession 9 out of 10 times.
The school’s defense was that they were being regulated by the Department of Education. If you don’t do this, we’ll shut you down.
Tyranny is what that is.
Private Practice
We have the Chevron defense having been overturned. That won’t be a problem going forward and overreach of government in all institutions. We could go down rabbit holes about why all the federal funding is bad. They dictate what they think should be taught without understanding what we need to be taught to be good doctors, entrepreneurs, business people, and adjusters. It’s crazy that way. Speaking of which, tell us about your practice. What was your practice like and how was that for those many years you were in private practice?
I graduated from Logan College. At that time, Logan was the Missouri Chiropractic College. We didn’t have any physical therapy. I was not taught a core curriculum. We didn’t have a lot of rehab. It was mostly basic sciences, clinical sciences, and lots of adjusting. When we all graduated, I thought we were good adjusters.
My dad was a straight chiropractor. He did almost nothing but Basic technique. He would use a local adjusting called Spears Adjusting. Spears do not talk too much anymore, but it’s a fantastic way of adjusting the full spine. Leo Spears was the Founder of Spears Chiropractic Hospital in Denver. They had 600 beds. He had his own adjusting technique called the Spears Painless System Adjusting. That’s what he had used. I learned my adjusting from him.
I was more interested in nutrition. I had a great nutrition teacher. He had a double PhD, one in nutrition and one in biochemistry. He could explain how the biomechanics or the biochemical points of physiology would interact with nutrition. I got involved with that. I was a student member of the counseling nutrition at the time.
When I was to start seeing patients, my dad gave me the offer to start my practice in his office because he was still a teacher at Logan. He teaches during the day and sees patients late afternoon and evening. He had a great work ethic. 6:00 in the morning with a coffee at the school. School starts at 6:45 in the morning. For five minutes, he eats, and twenty minutes for lunch. You’re done by 1:15. Therefore, you could have a practice the rest of the day.
In the ‘70s, when the CCE came through, they said, “You only have to have more hours.” They weren’t finished until about 3:30 or 4:00 with his patients during the day. The kicker is I had to stand there to watch him take care of his patients, which was an outstanding opportunity. He sits on one side of the bench. I sit on the other side of the bench. He’d see his patient until 9:00 at night. He did this for many years. I worked with him for a couple of years.
When he passed away, I needed to move my office further. I greatly expanded my office at the time because he had a small one-man office. I moved out a bit bigger. I wanted to do more stuff. I started seeing patients of all different kinds. At that time, my girlfriend, who became my wife, had a degree in business administration. That worked out great. She ran the business part of the practice. I ran the healthcare part of the practice. One time, she said, “I have a slogan for your practice. The slogan was, “8 to 80 blind, cripples, and crazy come knocking on your door.”
I’d start seeing my patients about eight days after birth. I’d see patients all the way through until their 90s. It didn’t matter what it was. They could come in with a knee problem, midback problem, or headache. If I didn’t know how to do it, I’d go out and learn how to do it. I started taking more seminars and expanding my abilities to do different things. I always took X-rays of my patients. I would approach by practice from a Basic technique point of view.
I continue to do that. I moved to California to help start a new college out there. When I went out there, I never thought I’d be taking care of athletes because I wasn’t an athlete. If you give a basketball, I’d throw it in a basket and it lands someplace else on earth. My daughter wanted to become a swimmer. My dad was a pro football player at one time. My mom played professional tennis. Everybody else in my family was a great athlete, but me.
When we went out to California, I didn’t fully understand AK. I thought you had to learn AK to be taking care of athletes. I started taking care of swimmers and learned more about the biomechanics of swimming. The good people at the ACA decided to start a certification class, the CCSP. They wanted to take over all the venues. If you don’t have CCS, we won’t let you take care of athletes. I said, “Almost every one of you that’s saying this. You were my student at one time. You told me that I can’t take care of athletes. I took your courses.
I went ahead and got my CCSP. By the time I left practice in California, I had to find five different chiropractors to take over my practice. They had a lot of kids. I had a large pediatric practice, pregnancy practice, athletic practice, workers’ compensation practice, and elderly practice. I couldn’t find any new graduates or graduates out in the field long enough to handle all those patients. I had to sell off parts of my practice to three different chiropractic groups who wanted to help patients.
I came back to Logan and said, “Can you teach this?” The longer you’re in practice, the more you learn. I’ve collected fifteen different certifications. One of the best ones I ever took is one that I’ve always wanted to take from the time I was a student was the one that Dr. Barge started. It was the Legion of Chiropractic Philosophy.
When I was still in California, they announced this new program. I had to fly to Palmer to take this. I said, “I can’t do it now.” They’re like, “If you do this again, please let me know. I said, “Okay.” They started the program, and Dr. Barge died. The people who took it over have done a great job. It was only the one time. By the time I was ready to take it, it wasn’t offered. It finished in 2001 or 2002.
I moved to St. Louis. I have more free time teaching this. People asked me, “When are you going to retire?” I’m like, ‘I am retired.” When you’re in practice and teaching, you’re working 68 to 80 hours. When you’re only teaching, it’s a lot less. You have more “free time.” When I heard the new program was going to start up, I said, “I’m in.” By that time, some of the upper people at Logan weren’t keen about sponsoring me. I say, “I don’t care. I’ll do it on my own.”
I talked to Rob Sinnott and took the first year. I learned a ton of stuff that I had heard about but didn’t have a full picture. By the time I was done with that, they said, “We’re going to start off the rest of the diplomat program, but do you want to take it?” I said, “Absolutely.” Some of the other students in that class were students of mine at Logan. Some of the students there were students of mine in California. It’s a fun thing.
I encourage that if you want to learn chiropractic and know how chiropractic affects the human body and why you’re in this to begin with, I’d advise you to take this set of courses. I hear that there’s one down at Sherman called the ACP, the Academy of Chiropractic Philosophers, which aligns with the LCP. Both of them feed into the diplomat course. I have a third weekend coming up in August 2024. That’s when we have to announce our subject where we’re going to do our thesis. The thesis has to be completed by the end of 2025.
Not that you have to divulge now, but have you decided on what you’re going to do your thesis on?
I have some ideas.
I like it.
I can’t let you share them because somebody is going to grab them.
Don’t let them take it.
Chiropractic is not a job. Chiropractic is a way of life.
Advice For Aspiring Chiropractors
It’s been nice having you on this show. We could talk to you for more hours, but we told you we would spend an hour with you, and it has been an hour-ish. Is there anything you want to end on? Anything that you wanted to talk about that you didn’t get a chance to tell our readers? If you had advice for a person who isn’t a chiropractor who’s considering chiropractic school, what would you tell them?
I would research different chiropractic colleges about what their reputation is and consider why you want to be a chiropractor. What do you want to do with that? Are you there to earn a living? Are you there to change someone’s life for the rest of their life? Do you want to do the things that no other fashion can do? Think about chiropractic and choose the right chiropractic college. All the colleges are good. Some are better than others in certain aspects. That would be another hour of discussion.
Episode Wrap-up
Some of it might get you in trouble. Thank you for having us. I would tell people where they could find you in practice, but they can’t find you in practice anymore. If you decide to go to Logan University, you can have him as an amazing professor. You can see him teach that seminar at Life University coming up in November 2024. You can look that up. I will be joining the Association for Chiropractic History. I’m happy that you’ve had us. Dr. Schurger, where can anybody find you if they’re looking for you?
I’m at KeystoneChiroSPI.com, Keystone Chiropractic in Springfield, Illinois.
I am at Precision Chiropractic. I’m on the west side of St. Louis, Missouri, PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com. Dr. Montgomery, for being with us.
Thank you for inviting me. It’s been fun.
We’ll see everyone else in another episode of The Blonde and The Bald. Bye.
Important Links:
- Dr. Patrick Montgomery
- Tortipelvis
- Torticollis
- Scoliosis
- www.HistoryOfChiropractic.org
- Facebook – Association For The History Of Chiropractic
- KeystoneChiroSPI.com
- PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com
- https://Linktr.ee/TheBlondeAndTheBald
About Dr. Patrick Montgomery
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